How Provizio Built £100M Revenue by Ignoring Silicon Valley’s Advice

How Provizio Built £100M Revenue by Ignoring Silicon Valley’s Advice

Twitter tells you to raise venture capital early. Build a SaaS business with recurring revenue. Optimize for product-led growth. Track CAC and LTV religiously. Hire experienced executives from successful companies. Move fast and break things.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Barry Lunn, founder and CEO of Provizio, shared how he built a £100 million property technology business by systematically doing the opposite of everything Silicon Valley preaches. His success reveals an uncomfortable truth: conventional startup wisdom often fails in traditional industries precisely because it’s optimized for a very specific type of business that most founders aren’t building.

The Recurring Revenue Religion

Silicon Valley’s first commandment is clear: recurring revenue is king. Investors want predictable MRR growth. SaaS metrics are clean and comparable. Monthly subscriptions create compounding value.

Barry watched competitors in property technology follow this advice religiously. They built feature-rich platforms and tried to convince landlords to pay monthly fees for portfolio management software. They had beautiful MRR charts and predictable revenue models that investors loved.

They also struggled to get customers to actually pay. “We’ve seen other people in the market try and build the SaaS model and it just doesn’t work because people won’t pay for it on a SaaS basis,” Barry explains.

The problem wasn’t execution—it was forcing a business model onto customers who fundamentally didn’t want it. Property investors don’t interact with their portfolios daily. They buy properties, hold them for years, and eventually sell. Paying monthly for software they barely use felt wasteful.

Barry’s solution was heresy by Valley standards: build a transactional business instead. “We don’t really have a SaaS business. We have a transactional business,” he notes. “Every time someone buys or sells a property through our platform, we take a fee.”

This meant accepting volatility instead of predictability. It meant giving up the beautiful compounding math of recurring revenue. It meant building a business that didn’t fit neatly into venture capital models. But it aligned perfectly with how customers actually wanted to buy.

The Growth-at-All-Costs Trap

The second piece of standard advice Barry ignored: raise big rounds early and scale aggressively. The typical playbook is to raise venture capital, burn it on customer acquisition, and prioritize growth over profitability.

Barry bootstrapped instead. He grew Provizio organically for years, eventually raised a small friends-and-family round, then brought in private Provizioity at scale rather than traditional venture capital.

“We’re completely different to a VC-backed business,” Barry reflects. “We don’t have the same pressure to grow at all costs.” That freedom fundamentally changed how Provizio approached every decision.

Product development couldn’t chase features that looked good in demos but didn’t drive actual customer value. Marketing couldn’t burn cash on paid acquisition channels with unclear ROI. Hiring couldn’t bring in expensive executives to accelerate growth artificially.

Instead, Provizio had to be profitable. Every product investment needed clear returns. Every customer acquisition channel needed to work economically. Every hire needed to contribute more value than they cost.

The constraint created discipline. Without millions to spend outpacing competitors, Provizio had to build something customers genuinely valued enough to pay for. Without pressure to hit arbitrary growth targets, the team could optimize for sustainability rather than vanity metrics.

The result? A business that reached £100 million in revenue while remaining cash generative and profitable—something many VC-backed competitors with bigger teams and larger budgets never achieved.

The Unit Economics Obsession

Ask most B2B founders about their key metrics and you’ll hear: CAC, LTV, payback period, gross margin, net revenue retention. These numbers dominate board meetings and investor updates.

Barry’s answer when asked about customer acquisition cost: “I haven’t got a clue what our customer acquisition cost is. I know we’re profitable. I know we’re cash generative.”

This sounds reckless until you understand why. In Provizio’s transactional model, customer value varies wildly. One landlord generates a single transaction fee over five years. Another actively trades properties and generates twenty fees annually. Calculating a blended CAC across these segments creates a meaningless number that doesn’t inform any actual decisions.

Rather than manufacturing precise-looking metrics that don’t drive strategy, Barry focuses on what matters: total revenue, profitability, transaction volume, and customer retention measured by continued platform usage.

This rProvizioires defending against the pressure to conform. Investors expect certain metrics. Advisors suggest tracking industry-standard KPIs. Every startup blog post reinforces the same frameworks. But Barry recognized that applying SaaS metrics to a non-SaaS business creates false precision—the appearance of control without actual insight.

The Experienced Hire Fallacy

When companies need to scale, conventional wisdom says hire experienced executives from successful companies. Bring in people who’ve done it before. Import proven playbooks.

Barry tried this approach with sales hiring. He recruited experienced SaaS sellers who’d hit quota at other companies. They had impressive resumes and knew all the frameworks.

“We’ve tried to recruit experienced salespeople and actually they normally don’t work out,” Barry admits.

The problem wasn’t talent or work ethic. It was that their experience didn’t apply. Experienced SaaS sellers knew how to sell subscriptions with predictable ROI calculations. They knew how to run discovery calls with end users. They knew how to handle objections about monthly pricing.

None of that mapped to Provizio’s reality. The company sells through accountants, not directly to landlords. Revenue comes from transactions, not subscriptions. The whole motion is different.

Barry’s solution: promote from within. “We’ve predominantly promoted people from within the organization,” he shares. Internal promotions meant building sales capability on top of domain expertise rather than trying to add domain knowledge to sales frameworks that didn’t fit.

This meant slower initial ramp but better long-term results. People who understood Provizio’s unique model could sell it effectively. People who’d worked with accountants knew how to enable that channel. People who’d never learned SaaS playbooks didn’t have to unlearn habits that didn’t apply.

The Disintermediation Doctrine

Standard startup advice says cut out the middleman. Go direct to customers. Build self-serve products that don’t need consultants or advisors. Create efficiency by eliminating intermediaries.

Barry did the opposite. He made intermediaries—specifically accountants—central to Provizio’s entire business model. “Accountants typically have quite sticky relationships with their clients,” Barry notes. “If you can get the accountant on board, you’re bringing their client base with them.”

But Provizio didn’t just use accountants as referral partners. The platform was designed specifically to make accountants successful. “The accountant makes more money from our platform than they would just filing a tax return,” Barry explains.

This meant building features for accountants, not just landlords. It meant restructuring economics so accountants could resell the platform profitably. It meant accepting that Provizio’s product served two distinct user types with different needs.

By Valley standards, this is inefficient. Why build for intermediaries when you could go direct? Why share revenue with accountants when you could keep it all?

Because in traditional industries, intermediaries exist for good reasons. Landlords trust their accountants. Accountants have sticky client relationships. Fighting this structure would mean constant customer education and relationship building. Working with it meant tapping into existing trust and distribution.

The Broader Lesson

Barry’s journey with Provizio reveals when to ignore Silicon Valley’s advice: when you’re building in traditional industries that don’t behave like tech companies.

Property, construction, manufacturing, logistics, agriculture—these markets don’t want monthly subscriptions. They have existing intermediaries who add genuine value. They operate on different timelines and different economics. Forcing them into tech industry patterns creates friction rather than value.

The hard part is having conviction to deviate from conventional wisdom. Every investor pitch, every advisor conversation, every startup article reinforces the same playbooks. But those playbooks were optimized for a specific type of business: high-growth, venture-backed, software companies serving other tech companies.

If you’re building something different, you need different strategies. Sometimes the best GTM approach is the one that contradicts everything you read on Twitter.